RIAA moves on to a new target – Usenet

Following the RIAA’s success in the first file sharing lawsuit that went to trial, the RIAA has moved on to its next target – Usenet.  The RIAA says that newsgroups contain millions of copyrighted song recordings that are in violation of federal law and has now filed a lawsuit against Usenet.com.  It alleges that Usenet.com, which is based in Fargo, N.D., in the south district of New York enables and encourages its customers to download and distribute millions of the record label’s recordings without permission.  It targeted this Usenet provider in particular claiming that it encourages customers to purchase a subscription by enticing them with copyrighted music.  It also claims that this provider has chosen to load groups from Usenet on to its servers that are explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement. 

For those unfamiliar with Usenet, it started off as a very popular way to distribute discussions and binary file content, long before the web, never mind Internet based P2P file sharing.  Newsgroups feature a hierarchical structure, much like a discussion forum, but in the forum of x.y.z.etc, such as microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware as an example of a text-only discussion group or alt.binaries.music as an example of a binary file news group containing music content.  These Usenet archives are replicated with other Usenet providers around the world.  To reduce the overall size of the Usenet archive a provider holds, a provider only stores binary files for a certain period of time, so the number of binary newsgroups and the binary retention time vary from provider to provider.  A few newsgroup providers do not store any binaries at all, such as Google’s Usenet archive.  See this Wikipedia article to see what Usenet is all about and how it works.

What concerns the RIAA, at least in its lawsuit is that there are 652 newsgroups containing "MP3" in their names.  If the RIAA wins its case against Usenet.com, it will likely start targeting other Usenet providers as well as Internet Service Providers and Universities that carry binary newsgroups.  For example, the ISPs AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, just to name a few all offer Usenet access. 

Thanks to DamnedIfIknow for letting us know about this news.  This user made the following comment:  Well, they finally got around to suing a usenet news server provider. If successful, the MPAA and BSA won’t be far behind. I can see a mass exodus of U.S. based providers to offshore countries where the DMCA and U.S. laws in general don’t apply. Good work RIAA!